Great Lakes Pharmaceuticals Inc. closed a $3.1 million Series B equity offering led by Charter Life Sciences, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capital firm with an office in Cincinnati.

The company, formed by Case Western Reserve University, University Hospitals Case Medical Center and Ricerca Biosciences LLC in 2005, plans to use the investment to complete a pivotal clinical study of B-Lock, its anti-microbial catheter lock solution.

The proposed merger between WuXi PharmaTech (Cayman) Inc. (NYSE:WX) and Charles River Laboratories International Inc. (NYSE:CRL) hit another snag after the Federal Trade Commission asked both companies for more information on the deal.

The request, detailed in a pair of regulatory filings, involves the viral clearance services, cell line characterization services and lot release testing services businesses of both companies

PharmacoPhotonics Inc. raised $1.5 million in equity to develop a device that measures kidney function.

The company’s device can provide a measure of the kidney’s function, or glomerular filtration rate, in 15 to 30 minutes. Current methods of determing GFR either provide a rough estimate or require collecting a patient’s urine samples over a 24-hour period.

Stryker Corp. (NYSE:SYK) expanded the number of seats on its board of directors to nine with the addition of the CEO of Belgian biopharm firm Roch Doliveux.

Kalamazoo, Mich.-based Stryker said Doliveux, UCB’s CEO and executive committee chairman since 2005, is the former CEO of Pierre Fabre Pharmaceuticals and former president of Schering-Plough International.

The largest individual shareholder of Charles River Laboratories International Inc. (NYSE:CRL) has deep reservations about the company’s proposed acquisition of WuXi (Cayman) PharmaTech Inc. (NYSE:WX) and they’re not shy letting their position be known.

Echo Therapeutics Inc. (OTC:ECTE) and Ferndale Pharma Group Inc. enrolled the first patients in a clinical trial of Echo’s Prelude SkinPrep device and Ferndale’s 4 percent topical lidocaine, ahead of an application for 510(k) clearance for the drug-device combo from the Food & Drug Administration.

Franklin, Mass.-based Echo’s Prelude device is a needle-free, transdermal drug delivery system that ablates a thin layer of skin before a drug is applied.

The Winchester, Mass.-based contract research organization said it will keep flying the Charles River banner and trade under its CRL ticker as it boosts its offerings to cover drug development from molecule creation to first-in-human testing.

Gardner, a private industry consultant, put in time as chief scientific officer at TransForm Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired in 2005 by Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ). After the buyout he stayed on as senior vice president of research and site leader for TransForm. His resumé also includes a stint at Merck & Co. (NYSE:MRK).